


Driver Picks The Music

by ivorygates



Category: Criminal Minds, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Don't Have to Know Canon, Fix-It, Gen, Mezzanine, SG-1 Crossover, Stargate SG-1 AU; Broken Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-06
Updated: 2009-12-06
Packaged: 2017-11-22 16:18:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/611771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for <em>"101 Times JD Nielson Hitched A Ride"</em>.</p><p>JD Nielsen meets Jason Gideon.  But it isn't the road to Damascus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Driver Picks The Music

Memory's a funny thing (oh yeah: hilarious: take my word for it) so I know it didn't happen when I think of it happening -- details are all wrong -- but when I listen in on my mind, on the rare occasions it pulls this memory out of storage, it's between Oregon and Colorado and I already know Mitchell's waiting at the end of it.

Not how it happened.  
  
It was while I was still hitching. (Half necessity, half a buried deathwish -- that's an O'Neill Special and it was damned hard to shake; the whole idea that nothing in life so becomes a man as his leaving of it -- because I was tired and I could see a lot of ways around but I didn't see any way _through_ and most of the time I was trying not to see anything at all.) The real reason I walked into the monastery at the other end of that, though -- tell the truth and shame the Devil -- was because part of me could see, even before I started, that I could do it. (It isn't self-delusion if you turn out to be right.) Starvation and exhaustion can take you to a no-mind state even cloistered monks would envy. (Maybe.) Flea, elephant-gun, facts are facts: there were times when I could see (yes, no, reply hazy try again) the way _through_. In flashes. Here and gone. Enough to add a little confidence to all that life-affirming desperation, even though that bright particular _kaffeklatch_ was being held, rather more than less, between my subconscious and my unconscious and I didn't get the password for that email address till a while later. It's enough to tell me why Memory's so damned determined to slot that night into a place it doesn't belong (recovered false memory syndrome: a plague in our schools -- next on Oprah).

Anyway.

It was a lovely spring night somewhere between Hither and Yon, in one of those large square places where the food comes from. Meaning it was raining like a bitch, and there wasn't anything like a town within fifty miles (or much I could turn into shelter without leaving evidence of my presence that would interest the bored local _gendarmerie_ ). A town would at least mean dry. Contrary to public opinion (meaning Mitchell) I don't like being cold anymore than anyone else does. I just don't _get_ cold that easily (not these days), but the tradeoff is in the calories (takes money to heat the house), and rain and temps in the middle forties made it hard to ignore the fact I hadn't eaten since the day before yesterday and had hiked about fifty miles since then.

So I was hitching, with no particular expectation anybody'd stop, but I was playing odds I couldn't see clearly. Not then.

Bored people are dangerous people (lessons learned in better private schools, select standing armies, and by every cop ever hatched), so when the car started slowing after it caught me in its lights, I was primed for a reverse _pase de la muerte_ American style. Oh, sure, it's loads of fun to scare hitchers by swerving at them. And a driver who thinks that's fun also thinks the laws of physics are just a suggestion that doesn't apply to him anyway.

But the car -- dark, nondescript, older four-door -- just cruised past me and cut over onto the shoulder, smooth enough and far enough ahead I didn't get splashed (couldn't get any wetter, but I could get dirtier). Stopped, and flashed its lights at me. _Hurry up, asshole._

I ran toward it. There was still a chance they'd just peel out when I got close -- pack humor not being -- but you don't bet, you can't win. It was the only car I'd seen out here in West Flyover for the last two hours. (Which meant, among other things, no oncoming headlights to show me how many were in the car.)

One.

A guy (which explained why he'd stopped, or made it make sense: women don't pick up hitchers), about the age I--

\--wasn't any more. I still had to remind myself (back in those days) over and over what people saw when they looked at me, because life was light on mirrors and wishful thinking's a bitch: skinny kid with an attitude (you can't love other people if you don't love yourself; if it sounds like a Hallmark card, sue me: it's still true). Probably running away from what we like to politely refer to (in genteel circles) as "home". Probably trouble (certainly trouble -- that was true enough -- just not for them).

"Get in," he said. "It's raining."

"Yeah," I said. "Thanks for stopping."

I got in quick and tucked my pack between my feet. If I had to bail in a hurry I didn't want to lose it. He was rolling again before I got the door shut.

Usually they ask your name first and then where you're going. Then they try to figure you out for a while before asking leading questions and offering useless advice. Jesus. Job offers. The joys of parental reconciliation. (One set of parents -- the ones I couldn't claim -- were long dead, and the other one -- my real one -- was praying _I_ was dead. Or he would've been if he was still a praying man. Jesus and I parted ways a while back and I wasn't interested in the kind of jobs somebody who looked the way I did now would be offered.)

This guy just drove. He drove like he was going to be graded on it later: eyes flicking between the road and the mirrors, and right on the speed limit.

The dash lights were turned down low, but I could see perfectly well. I made him for somewhere in his fifties. Dressed like-- Call it a retired college professor (I intended to, not being a fan of pouring salt into old wounds). Hair short enough that if he'd been teaching the liberal arts I could make a good guess at his politics. The kind of lines in his face that said whatever he'd been doing -- or was still doing -- he didn't like it all that much. Or he liked it, but was a hard road.

About the time I was deciding that none of the things I saw quite added up, he said: "Gideon. You?"

I managed to stop myself before I answered: _call me JD_ because nothing says "fake name" like that kind of hedging, and I was starting to get the feeling he'd pick up on that. So: "JD," I said. "And no, you can't ask what it stands for."

That got me half a smile. The kind where something isn't really funny, but hey, the other guy's making an effort.

I wasn't particularly worried about Gideon (or Mr. Gideon. Could be a first name, could be a last name, could be somebody else's name. It means "Mighty Warrior" -- also "Feller of Trees" -- and for reasons I was trying hard to forget, I also happened to know the name "Gideon" was a variant on the name "Jerub-Baal", which meant "let Ba'al plead", none of which was useful just now), because of the butterfly knife I had in my sock (the only reason to wear socks is to have a place to hide a knife) -- although if I had to pull it, I'd probably have to use it, and there aren't a lot of ways to control an adult male with a three-inch blade that don't end with somebody bleeding. I didn't want to go there -- even if Mr. Feller of Trees turned out to deserve it -- because it would attract attention.

About the time I was starting to wonder not _if_ he was crazy, but _just how crazy_ he was, he got around to Usual Question #2. So I said "west" (safe enough; we were on 90 West) and he said he was hoping to make Blue Earth before he stopped. (Blue Earth, Minnesota, contains a statue of the Jolly Green Giant. Don't ask me how I know.)

And that was about it for the conversation, but I was interested now. (It would be a lot of miles and months before I understood that the Monkey Mind will do anything in its power to distract you any time you get close to an idea that disturbs it (the concept of having to _work_ disturbs it), and my interest came mostly from the fact it meant I didn't have to listen to the inside of my own head. It was a noisy place back then: I think I told Keller- _roshi_ once (early days) that I thought of it as a lunatic asylum after lights out, with all the inmates screaming through the bars. I was luckier than I deserved that Keller- _roshi_ didn't just turf me and bury me in the garden for the good of all Mankind. And I'm still not sure -- even here, even now -- whether Keller- _roshi_ actually believes in the fundamental perfectibility of Man, or if he's just an optimist with a toolkit. Doesn't really matter.)

I watched Mr. Mighty Warrior out of the corner of my eye; I already knew he was the type who'd redline at being obviously studied: he was on high sentry and high alert, and I didn't think it was me. He'd stopped, after all.

So… why?

I didn't think military, current or ex. It was a lot of little things. The sweet disorder in the dress. The fact he was driving through downtown nowhere. The fact he picked up hitchhikers and then clammed up. That left a number of intriguing or discouraging possibilities. Cop. Mercenary. Lunatic. Because the penny finally dropped: there's a particular way you sit when you've got a gun digging into your kidneys. Even if you're used to it. Even if it's a comfy chair (this castle hath a pleasant seat). Armed and watchful (but not twitchy) and picking up strangers (and I was stranger than most). _"One of these things is not like the other…"_ a catchy little ditty I was too old and too young to know. My fake paper had me born in 1988. Almost twenty years after it started, Sesame Street wasn't the same institution it'd been seventeen years before. And Sara and I…

Sara and _he._ Sara and _he,_ not my life, not my wife, not my son, and I wasn't going to think about that _(him, them, her)_ now or ever. (Some bright boy at the SGC suggested she'd be the perfect placement for me. Yeah. So would the Ninth Circle of Hell. _"Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"_ and fasten your seat belts.)

"So what brings you out here to the middle of nowhere?" I asked (brightly, to drown out the noise in my head).

"I'm retired," he said. And that, boys and girls, was the point at which Your Humble Narrator strongly reconsidered all his transportation choices for this fine and clement evening. Because (a) he was lying (and who bothers to lie to a random stranger if their soul is stainless?) and (b) he was lying blatantly, obviously, unmistakably. And I could either call him on it or let it slide.

I'm sure I've mentioned, now and then, that I _really fucking hate_ the kind of choices where the right one isn't obvious.

"This is where I tell you I'm meeting up with friends, that I check in with them daily, and that they know exactly where I am," I said.

"Good," he said, in 'I don't believe you' tones. There was a lot more to the sentence, but since he didn't say it out loud, I didn't get to hear it. The quality of the silence suggested he was having a lively chat, somewhere inside. That was more information, because the only people who talk to ghosts are the ones who have them. I started thinking 'ex-cop' and 'detective' and wondering what kind of cases he'd worked. (If he _was_ a cop -- and retired -- he'd retired recently, and you can spell that 'not in the natural way of things.')

"It doesn't matter how smart you are," he said, when I'd stopped expecting anything audible.

"Beg pardon?"

"People vanish all the time," he said, and I wasn't sure whether he was talking to me, or to himself. "Over a hundred thousand active cases right now. Missing persons," he added, then looked at me. "Sixty thousand under eighteen."

"Sounds like you know a lot about it," I suggested (nobody has statistics like that on the tip of their tongue without a personal stake). That got me another not-quite-smile and more silence.

The quality of the silence changed when headlights showed up in the rear view mirror. Hard to identify; it was raining hard enough that the car thought about hydroplaning every now and then, even with all the care he was taking (cautious, meticulous, and ex-cop didn't feel quite right, but I couldn't say why). Since Minnesota doesn't run to hurricanes, it was probably a monsoon that'd lost its GPS. Our boy (Ba'al's defense lawyer, only not) tensed up in an understated way when the lights appeared. Expecting a friend? (I really hoped not.) The other car -- black van -- clocked past us in the hammer lane. The spray it kicked up hit the car with a carwash thump, and for a moment visibility was nil. The van disappeared into the distance quickly enough that I estimated the driver was doing a good ten miles over the speed limit.

"It's a bad night to be out," my Samaritan said, and somehow I didn't think he was talking about the van. "People get careless."

I was starting to wonder, in an idle fashion, if I was one of them, but (dammit) it just didn't feel right. Later, I'd have an explicit understanding of the Hesitation Waltz people do when they're circling around confessing (telling the truth is always a confession, honest): now, I was flying by the seat of my pants.

"This is where I tell you I've changed my mind about walking and ask you to pull over -- only that wouldn't convince either of us, frankly, because it's wet enough to drown ducks out there. And somehow, Mr. Gideon, you don't quite strike me as the kind of guy who cruises the byways of America looking for lonely strangers to dismember."

That got an actual laugh out of him. It sounded like something in pain. (He didn't correct me, either, so it might actually be _Mr._ Gideon, assuming that was his name at all.) "You think you'd know," he said, and it was scorn and anguish and pain all wrapped up in one tidy package tied with a sparkly ribbon. "They always think they'll know. The women who let Bundy give them a ride home. The women who opened their doors and let deSalvo in. The goddamned _Secret Service_ cleared Gacy. _'Evil is always unspectacular and always human.'_ "

"Auden," I said, just to show I was listening. "Albert deSalvo was never actually charged with the Strangler murders, you know," I added mildly. "I _do_ know that to control me, you'd have to take your hands off the wheel. That pretty much means stopping. You might've fiddled with the door locks, but I could smash the window and be on my way before you could do much of anything. Most people don't fight back hard enough, soon enough. State, local, or Fed?"

There was the kind of pause that tells you (this was something I didn't need to learn later, it having been one of my Core Life Skills from Before) the other person is listening to what you're saying, not just shooting back a canned response.

"Retired," he said again (a little more emphasis this time). "You think you could fight back. Hard enough. Long enough. Well enough." There was another long silence, while he went off inside his head again. I was at least eighty percent sure he wasn't bragging, just complaining. I've played worse hands. "Most people don't want to believe in monsters. They shouldn't have to know-- They shouldn't have to believe in them to stay alive. "

I waited, letting the silence spin out. I was curious to see if he was going to say anything more. It was confessional-dark in the car, the only sound the heartbeat lub-dub of the wipers. Between the car heater and the chance to not get rained on for a while, I was damp now instead of half-drowned. It's actually more uncomfortable -- or rather, by the time you get to that point, you can afford to bitch about inconsequentials.

"The trouble is," he said at last (talking more to himself than to me, but talking because I was there), "people -- innocent, normal people -- don't believe. They think it's all fairytales. Hollywood. Stephen King. Your average monster cleans up well. He gets a high-powered lawyer looking for a high-profile case, and _he_ waves the spectre of the sainted Caryl Chessman at the jury, and implies that DNA evidence doesn't count. He tells them all about the monster's tragic childhood. And he walks. Sometimes we get a second chance at him. Sometimes not."

I didn't have a single fucking clue who Carol Chessman was, but I was pretty sure by now my gracious host had done his time at Quantico. The FBI hates the "cult of personality" as much as the military does (for the same reason: all their highly-trained specialists are supposed to be interchangeable and the laurels should rest with the organization, not the individual), and the bright kiddies of the BSU burn out fast. Especially if they're good. I had the feeling (call me a crazy dreamer) that our Mighty Warrior had been one of the good ones.

I know (I'd known) a bit about monsters, once upon a past life experience. Even if you win the battle, you've still seen the elephant. There are some things you can't forget. Trying to is how you stay alive.

And some people don't manage it. I didn't want to think about that, because those weren't my memories (not any more) and it wasn't my past (not any more, not any more, not mine, not mine, the refrain I'd lived with every day of my half-year half-life -- you call this living? -- and something I knew I had to come to terms with. Somehow), but because I remembered those things -- however illicitly -- I wanted to help him. Because I had more than a hunch that Mr. Gideon had looked into the abyss, and you know what Freddy Nietzsche says about that…

I had no idea where to start. (I never had, _he_ never had, I hated him, I pitied him for the failures and terrors and losses that defined him and lived on in my memory and eventually -- always -- it came around to hating myself, and that was the personal-serving purpose-built custom-made abyss I was dancing on the brink of.) "You're a good man," I said, hearing the awkwardness in my voice. "You did your best."

I could practically hear his mind stop and start and stutter its way through a dozen retorts, and suddenly I knew he'd had a team (somewhere) and been part of something that forged bonds closer than blood or birth and I wondered if his team was dead and that was why he was here.

"I appreciate the vote of confidence," he finally said, dry as bones. "Even if you're an idiot."

"Gosh, Dad, thanks for the morale boost," I said. "I'm not wrong." In those days, I still clung to the idea that having the last word on the outside would shut up the chorus on the inside.

"That's what I wonder about," he said, and it was cop-voice, CO-voice, the voice from the little room without windows where the furniture is all metal and the only way to get the door to open is to give up secrets you'd rather take to your grave. He hadn't moved, didn't take his eyes off the road, but all of a sudden I was the focus of his attention in a way I hadn't been before. My mind made comparisons to things I couldn't know: decompression chambers and lethal doses of radiation and invisible forces that picked you up and slammed you into walls. "Here you are," he went on (still mild, still building his argument, and I could feel the weight of some inevitable conclusion waiting in the wings, and it didn't matter whether it would be right or wrong), "I figure you're, oh, somewhere between fourteen and sixteen. Well-educated. Confident, even cocky. The kind of kid who should be at home. In school. Yet here you are, out in the middle of nowhere. Too thin, old clothes -- not even a jacket -- backpack, not suitcase. So I wonder what you're running away from, and how long you've been running. I'd say you've been on your own for quite a while, but that doesn't fit with you being in your teens. You can spot a cop, but you aren't worried about the possibility of being turned over to the nearest child protective authorities. Interesting that you should include 'Federal Agent' in your list. Prior experience, or a groupie, but somehow neither one fits. You're too confident. Look at the way you're trying to build a trust relationship with me by implying you know the choices I've made and validating them. That's not the behavior of your average teenager, even a precocious one. So there are a lot of things that don't add up here, JD, and I can't help but remember that too many of the victims invited the monster in."

"I'm not a monster," I answered. But the denial was too quick, and I could hear the falsity in it.

"You think you are," he said calmly. "Or you're afraid you are. That's why you ran."

The Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico looks at a crime scene (the evil that men do lives after them) and comes up with what the Fibbies call an "offender profile", a psychological beat-down of the person who did the deed. If you aren't a cop, you call it a "personality profile", and say it can define someone and predict his actions. Either way, it can look like voodoo. I know: it had been one of my tools, too (not mine, not mine, not mine), and for the last several months I'd been dusting off those old tools to try to see myself from the outside. To make myself into the person I looked like (the person I was supposed to be, now, and I'd refused to poke at how I felt about that because I was afraid of what I'd find). And Supervisory Special Agent Gideon (retired) had seen the package, and the lies, and even though he was missing the key that would make the jigsaw make sense (and oh god, for an instant I wanted to _tell him_ because -- in hindsight -- I was more desperate than I realized for understanding: mine, some random stranger's) he'd seen enough of the pieces to tell me I was _seriously fucked_.

"Why'd you leave the Bureau, Agent Gideon?" I answered. The best defense always used to be a good attack, and even if it was a piss-poor defense, it was all I had.

"There's a diner up ahead. I'm going to stop," he said.

It was more of a truck stop than a diner, the kind of place that puts its "good eats" sign on sixty-foot pylons five miles before the exit and offers twenty-four/seven food-gas-showers. There were about a dozen eighteen-wheelers pulled up, hoping for a break in the weather, I was guessing: none of them wore fleet colors, and a lot of time the independents live hand-to and god help their brake lines. No civilians, because this wasn't the kind of place civilians stopped if they had a choice. In weather like this, Mom and Pop and Sister Sue stayed home, or found a hotel, or were broke and desperate to make time and barely had the cash for gas. Agent Gideon (he'd always be Citizen Javert to me) pulled up right in front. Not because of the rain. Because of the light.

"What's in the bag, JD?" he asked, as if the question had just occurred to him.

"Severed heads," I snarled, grabbing my pack and yanking the door open. I noticed I was a little surprised when it opened easily, which annoyed me. Out of simple perversity, I stood there beside the car while he got out instead of moving toward shelter. He didn't pay any attention. He'd pulled on a tweed jacket on his way out of the car; he snapped the collar up and walked toward the entrance, and I thought of stakeouts and places where the rain never stopped.

I could stand out here in the monsoon, or I could go in.

I went in.

The place was laid out diner-style, booths and a counter instead of "family dining" tables. There were maybe eight customers: three at the counter, the other five in booths, one solo. Agent Gideon took the booth farthest back -- the one I would've picked -- and sat facing the door. I could either sit in his lap, or have my back to the room. I didn't like either choice, and I knew I was being played, and I couldn't see a lot of options (when all your choices are bad ones, pick the one that will piss people off the most). I followed him to the booth and wedged myself in to the corner, my back to the window.

It was my first chance to get a good look at my Samaritan (I'd been avoiding Samara for months; kinda hard when you don't know where it is). He was greyer than I'd been able to see in the car; I rounded my estimate of his age up by about five years. He had a kindly-ugly face. Full of lines: laugh lines around the eyes, thought-lines between them, the deep cuts around the mouth that pain (physical or emotional) puts there. Pain, anger, frustration. Rage. Brown eyes, the kind that look warm until you take a second look, and then the whole face looks like a mask. Blunt laborer's hands, a little scarring on the knuckles. He wasn't soft -- though you could mistake him for being -- but his days of being in peak physical condition were a few years-or-decades in the past (after forty it's patch, patch, patch).

The word I kept coming back to was "kindly", even though I knew it wasn't half a story, Daddy. Kindness, compassion, empathy… those were the things that could kill you faster than a bullet to the heart.

I wondered what he saw when he looked at me. I didn't want to know, because then I'd have to _do something_ about it. What I'd been doing so far was running. There are limits to how long and how far you can run.

And I looked up at the big fisheye mirror in the corner, and I realized he'd been able to watch me as we came in. Body-language is the hardest thing to change. Harder than speech patterns. What you move like matters a lot more than what you _look_ like. I knew that. I was doing my best. (And I also knew that a disguise imposed from outside is no disguise at all. You have to _believe_ in it, or it doesn't count. And I'd always sucked at faith.)

When I looked back, he had a little smile on his face, like he knew what I was thinking, like I'd handed him a book he'd been waiting to read. It didn't _matter_ if I could smack back and tell him his life history accurately enough to put a little more grey in that hair. Agent Gideon had a local habitation and a name, and even if he'd run off with the key to the executive washroom, he could claim his own past and his own memories (whether he wanted to or not). What would happen if the wrong (right) name was attached to me was that (at best) my local habitation would become a very small, very private room. Telling someone the truth (confirming their guess, even though the idea of somebody guessing right was enough to boggle the imagination) would mean I'd violated half the provisions of the National Security Act, and even if I ( _if he, if he, if he_) had lived most of my (his) life under the Cone of Silence, he'd done it with official sanction. Sanction in the other sense was what was waiting for me if I slipped (if I fell), and out where the streetlights end might be familiar territory, but that didn't mean I was too stupid to see it made me vulnerable.

I was trying to decide what to say to push him in the direction I wanted him to go. I was saved by our waitress, coming over with a pot in one hand and menus in the other. Agent Gideon (hewer of trees, drawer of water, Devil's Advocate) waved them away and ordered two specials: bacon, eggs, sausage, home fries, pancakes, juice. I amended my order to the tune of two more eggs and another short stack on the side: it wasn't that I didn't have the money for food; it was more a case of not having any place to shop lately.

"When was the last time you ate?" he asked, after she'd left.

"You get up to make a call and I'm gone," I said. I concentrated on my coffee, doctoring it up, slurping it (too damned hot) to make room and adding more cream and sugar. The great and secret public show was so I wouldn't have to look at his face.

In answer he reached into his jacket pocket (I twitched, even tough I knew that wasn't where he kept his piece) and set his cellphone on the table. "I'd hate to lose the company." Beat. "Anyone you want to call?" he added.

There was, but only if that phone came equipped with a time machine. So I shrugged, and did my best to relax my face into sullen teenage blankness. (But somebody the age I was supposed to be would be as easy for him to read as a newspaper, and I could stop the flow of information -- I knew I could -- but I couldn't make it flow the way I wanted it to. Not if somebody was really looking.)

"I should take this golden opportunity to mention I'm--" _not running away from anything,_ I wanted to say, but the Ghost of Authority Figures Past wouldn't let me lie flat-out "--a legal adult. Emancipated Minor, you know? Paperwork in my pack." (It wasn't, because I hadn't had the time and the place and the loved one all together to forge it, but the nice thing about the Civilized is that they rarely call a bluff.) "Just taking the opportunity to see more of this great country of ours before I settle down." I manage to assume the "fuck you/bite me" all purpose facial tic of disenchanted youth. In character. Angry pissed off people (nothing annoys superiors and other would-be gods like the presumption of equality) don't think. Don't look at the man behind the curtain. (I knew it wouldn't work, but I had to go down swinging.)

"Really?" he answered, and his geniality was as much a lie as my smirk. "That's great. What are you planning to be when you grow up, JD?"

"Older," I answered instantly, and he looked like I'd given him another puzzle piece.

"We don't really know a lot about how human intelligence works," he said, just as if I gave a flying fuck. "The tests to measure and quantify it are less reliable at the ends of the scale. Most of psychology is based on studies of the average. Adults. It's only been recently that anyone has devoted much time to studying abnormal and exceptional children. We know that children who come from abusive or highly-stressful backgrounds often exhibit a highly sophisticated ability to interact with the adults in their environment as peers. I knew-- Children of exceptional intelligence confront a stressful environment by definition. Add abuse, family trauma, to that and the exceptional child either fails to retain emotional integrity entirely or develops exceptional coping strategies to manage his environment in a fashion he can comprehend."

_'I knew someone once who--'_ The slip wasn't unintentional. It was bait. I was supposed to ask Agent Gideon about the boy genius he'd loved and lost, and with my artless unguarded questions hand over the keys to the castle.

Not happening.

"Look--" I began, but that was when Madge-the-waitress showed up with her arms stacked with plates, and I remembered being hungry all the time the _last_ time I was this age (separating myself from _him_ was kind of a lost cause, because they were _my_ memories, too, and dammit, I _needed_ some of them to chart my course, since if I was just going to lobotomize myself I could have opted for the Black Camel behind Door Number Three), but these days I wasn't just hungry, I was ravenous. If Gideon had said right then he was a stalking horse put in my way by the NID, I would've told him to hold that thought until I'd had breakfast. I restrained myself (barely) from just chugging the syrup straight from the pitcher, but my table manners had more in common with the semi-mythical "starving Armenians" of my other youth, and I'd already worked my way through half the food on my plate before my companion in gracious dining finished his eggs.

"Look," I said again as I slid my side order of pancakes onto my plate to join their brothers and sisters. "I'm not a problem. I'm not _your_ problem. I'm not going to flip out in the belltower of your choice and start shooting kids, and I'm not going to lure unsuspecting motorists off into the woods and kill them." I stopped before I started saying what I _would_ do, because I really didn't know.

"Oh, JD," Gideon said, shaking his head. "What are we going to do with you?"

It was a comment nicely-calculated to put me even more on the defensive, and a defensive game never wins. You always have to take the war to the enemy.

"You're one of Quantico's Finest," I said. "Profile work is a tough job. You were good at it. You did it for a long time. You had a support team. You would have trusted any of them with your life. The pressure-cooker didn't bother you as much as the media trying to romance you. Turn you into some kind of infallible hero." I wasn't sure where I was getting this, but it _felt_ right. Partly intuition, partly building on the hints he'd let drop. Partly because The Other Guy had lived a life that was pretty similar, and now I was trying to learn how to stop. "It made the ones your locals didn't catch hurt even more. You knew there was no such thing as a hundred percent success rate, but you couldn't convince yourself. What was worse, though--" I knew I'd gotten into the kill-zone by the way he went completely still "--was the times you _did_ catch them, and you and the locals both knew you had the right man. The monster. And then somebody else let him walk." I blinked, as the back of my mind updated me. "You know where they are. The ones who went free. You know what they'll do, and how they'll do it. And you know if they've been caught once they'll be twice as hard to catch again."

This was the answer. It had to be. Guys who retire _go home_ , to their wife or their dog or their stamp collection. Guys who've packed it in, fought the good fight, won and lost and mourned and _quit_ do not patrol the byways armed and vigilant.

He was either hunting monsters without benefit of clergy, or he'd become a monster himself.

"But hey. Retired," I said. I'd tiptoed up to my conclusion, and I was going to tiptoe away again. Some things are better not put into words. A lot of things, really.

"You want this?" he asked, pushing his plate a couple of inches toward me. "I'm not going to be able to finish it all."

I took the plate. I hadn't been too proud to eat when there was food in front of me -- no matter who offered it, and for what reason -- since several decades before I'd _been_. Food was a tool. ( _You are the weapon,_ memory whispered, not mine, not mine, not me.) Eat, and survive. Survive, and fight. Fight, and win. (It was just too fucking bad I already knew that if this _was_ a war, I didn't want to win it. Boo-hoo, life is strange.) He'd left half his potatoes and all his pancakes, and our orders came with toast, because hey, breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and no carbo-loaded matutinal feast can possibly be complete without toast. I dug in, Marge came back to refill our cups (and set out a new creamer, and when she said can-I-get-you-boys-anything-else, I ordered a slice of pie, because who knew when I'd cross paths with food again). She walked off, I started piling jelly on pieces of cold toast. Grape. I really didn't like marmalade that much (sue me), but the strawberry jam packets always go first, so what's left is always grape, apple (if you're lucky), and marmalade. Nobody likes marmalade. Big surprise.

We'd achieved impasse. I could see Gideon thinking. Gideon of the FBI (retired), killer of killers, slayer of dragons, vigilante against monsters (and it was one of Life's Little Ironies that if he was any good at his new avocation, and had been pursuing it for any length of time, he'd become, by definition, the very thing he was hunting). I knew, he knew I knew, I knew he knew I knew. (Knowing is half the battle.) And I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do about any of it. (Okay, aside from telling him this was where we kissed and parted, and seeing if I could promote another ride here or at least wait out the rain.)

Marge came back with my pie and the check. I picked it up, glanced at it long enough to split the bill, then started digging in my (damp) jeans for my (equally damp) cash.

"I've got it," he said, pulling out his wallet. He dropped a twenty and a five on it. Nice tip.

"I can pay," I protested. He just gave me an all-knowing smirk. His problem. I kept my money. False pride will kill you. So will honest pride.

In some parts of the country, people pour maple syrup on their pie. I'd been schooled out of showing that kind of regional identifier a long time ago. (Longer ago than was possible, and it wasn't enough to do the math and run the numbers -- born in this year, this old in that year -- to truncate my existence, I had to try to ignore all the things _he'd_ learned and had never been able to forget, and if I could do it or I couldn't do it, who did that make me? I didn't know. All I _did_ know was that living that way was a recipe for disaster.)

I ate pie. "You know," I said, after the third forkful, "there's no such thing as absolute morality. Hear me out--" I added, because he'd started to cloud up. "I'm not saying 'everything is relative'. I'm saying that if you do a good thing, it doesn't matter if you did it for a good reason or a bad one. The result is good." Apparently my subconscious had decided to go back into social work while I was eating.

"I'd think it would matter to whoever did it," he said, in that 'Devil's Advocate' voice that told me he was just leading me on. I smiled at him, the way I'd--

No. The future begins here.

"Not so much," I answered. "Doing a bad thing for a bad reason, now … that sucks. Unless, of course, you're bad yourself. Then I guess it would just be stupidity. But the joker in the deck is doing a bad thing for a good reason, or a good cause, or just for good. That's the one people have trouble with. There're plenty of lies you can tell yourself, but personally, I've found that self-justification never really helps. If you do -- someone does -- bad things so that good people can sleep safe at night, just … accept it." I was talking to him, but turned out (surprise) I was talking to myself, too. Because I (he) never had. Eliot said: _To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life._ Caiaphas said: _It is expedient that one man should die for the good of the people._ The Other Guy spent his whole life doing the useful thing for the good of the people, and he'd hated it, and I couldn't live his life, and I hated _that._ I took a deep breath. "Someone has to do it."

He had his head down, studying his fingernails as if they were the most fascinating thing in the world. Now he looked up, and whatever he saw when he looked at me (I'd used to know, I'd used to know a lot of things), the gloves were off.

"There are sacraments of evil as well as good," he said. "Arthur Machen. The problem with knowing your enemy is seeing him when you look in the mirror."

He waited for me to protest, declare, persuade, defend -- and I would have, but it would have required me to know the answer to the implicit question. Not the immediate question (done deal): _how do you know when you've turned into what you're fighting?_ but the two that followed it: _which side are you on?_ and: _what are you going to do now?_ The only trouble was, I wasn't sure I was allowed to leave the war without a pass from the Hall Monitor, and I had a place to go, but it wasn't home, because I wasn't sure they'd take me in.

"It always was," I answered quietly. "That's why it's a good idea to have somebody check your work."

He smiled at that. It still only looked like the sketch of a smile, the what's-left when the smile's turned into empty habit, and I thought about schoolyard taunts _(see ya see ya wouldn't want ta be ya)_ and old ghosts and second chances, and however much it _fucking sucked_ , I was luckier than I'd ever deserved to be. Call it unearned grace.

I looked down as my fork clicked on the plate, and realized the pie was gone, so I chugged the rest of my coffee. Time to go.

"So you said you were headed west. How far west?"

"Oregon," I answered. Chasing a dream. Nothing new there.

"Funny thing." Apparently we'd both come to decisions. "In a hurry?"

"Yeah, no," I said.

He stood up -- pushing off from the table top to do it -- shook his jacket out the way people will when something's damp and clingy (or they want to make sure their hideout piece is covered), and looked all around the diner, spotting everyone and what they were doing. "I'm heading for Frisco. I've got a few stops to make along the way. A few days each. You're welcome to ride along."

As companion to an avenging angel on a multi-state killing spree? "Shotgun," I said promptly.

"Driver picks the music," he answered, right on the beat.

We walked out together.

###

**Author's Note:**

> Once upon a time Synecdochic posted a little challenge: _"101 Times JD Nielson Hitched A Ride"_. The original post can be found here: http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/364597.html
> 
> JD Nielsen (Mezzanine, a Stargate SG-1 AU) and Jason Gideon (Criminal Minds). Kind of a fixit for how Gideon left the show. And why.


End file.
